Aug 19 No Phoenix in Sight: Hillary's Prophecy and How the Left's White Privilege Stuck us with Führer Trump

Hillary Clinton walks to stage on election night to deliver her concession speech.

While our national media was in a tizzy about Hillary Clinton's "negatives" that they helped create and the entire Republican party was having orgasms over nontroversies like Benghazi and Emailzzz(!), Hillary Clinton herself was emerging as somewhat of a prophet about a possible Trump presidency.

Clinton's prophecies are now materializing with scary precision. Every word of Hillary Clinton's warnings about a disturbing preview of the Trump presidency is playing out in front of our very eyes. And it is playing out in front of our very eyes for one simple reason: despite winning 3 million more votes than Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton is not president.

There are many reasons why she is not president.

Donald Trump tapped into deep racist resentments among the much fetishized "white working class" voters who did not simply want to build a wall between the United States and Mexico but saw Hillary Clinton's blunt and unwavering defense of people of color as an affront to their dominionism. Even worse than having a black president, they saw a white woman embracing the cause of equal rights as a matter of race treason.

The media obsessed over emails, a matter that had already been thoroughly investigated to find absolutely nothing. They refused to effectively address Trump's violent bigotry, mob chants of "lock her up", and a unified Republican anti-constitutional determination to deny the sitting President of the United States the opportunity to fill a Supreme Court vacancy that arose during his duly elected term in office.

You can even blame a campaign miscalculation here and there.

But few others - including Donald Trump and the media - did as much damage to Hillary Clinton's candidacy and by extension, did as much favor to Trump, as the Left's anti-Hillary dudebros. As blatant about their ideological dogma as their Trump dudebro brethern, and as merciless in their attacks against a woman who dedicated her life to public service, advocated for the rights of marginalized groups here at home and across the globe, and had the courage to tell the uncomfortable truth about internal and institutionalized racism, the Leftist reactionaries helped Trump's cause as much Bannon's band of deplorables.

The Left's dudebros - predominantly supporters of primary candidate Bernie Sanders - competed for the title of the most racially insensitive campaign in modern memory, and may well have earned the gold were their challengers anyone other than a Republican campaign run by confederates and open white supremacists.

What the Left's dudebros did was an insult to the coalition Barack Obama built to win two historic terms as president. Their message, actions and behavior gave power to the false narrative that in modern American politics, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, mysogyny, able-ism and other forms of bigotry were too small to matter and could be all solved by some grand economic scheme. Sanders and Trump - and more importantly, their most ardent supporters - agreed on that basic premise. The only difference was in their approach to what that grand economic scheme should look like.

The Leftist dudebros consisted mostly privileged straight white males (remind you of another group?) but also feasted on the support of a few black and brown faux-intellectuals more interested in pushing their "poverty tour" and books than actually addressing poverty and who monetized the questioning of Barack Obama's "blackness". These dudebros pretended that as long as white America's "economic anxiety" (retire that) was addressed, everything would take care of itself.

They clobbered Hillary Clinton for supporting raising the minimum wage but not enough (in retrospect, she turned out to be prescient in her stand to raise the federal minimum to $12 and let states and municipalities raise it further), they haunted her for wanting to make Obamacare better instead of embarking on the second overhaul of the American healthcare system for the second time in less than a decade, and they demonized her for having given speeches to Wall Street firms in her time as a private citizen. They held as heroes the people at Wikileaks doing Russia's and Trump's bidding by releasing information collected by a foreign adversary in a cyber attack on the United States.

All of that was forgivable by the Berniebros because Bernie talked about the things they wanted to hear, although he never actually achieved anything of significance in a Congressional career that exceeded the lifetimes of many of his most staunchest, in-your-face, backers. Bernie talked about single payer health care, free college, and breaking up the banks, and dudebros were riveted. He never outlined the how's of his lofty ideals, and they could care less. He - and they - to the extent they address issues of racism and sexism, they did so essentially by noting that black lesbians need jobs, too. There was no semblance of recognition that racism was a distinct (and more urgent) issue than economic ones. In their tradephonic rants these 'bros' echoed Trump and his followers' lie that trading with Asian and Latin American countries would spell doom for American (ahem, white American) jobs.

In doing all this, they strengthened and fed the narrative that the feeling of loss the "white working class" felt due to their white privilege being challenged here at home and across the globe was a legitimate cause, rather than racism by another title. They legitimized white rage, albeit in a more subtle way and with more plausible deniability than Trump. They succeeded in driving many likely Democratic votes to third party, and many more not to vote at all.

They did all this because they believed that it is better to burn down the house than to do the painful work of putting the building blocks back in place one at a time. In their ill-considered judgment, only such immolation would cause the phoenix of their utopia to rise.